[OpenAFS-devel] Re: Fuse and testsuite

[Simon Wilkinson]

On 26 Sep 2011, at 01:16, Andrew Deason wrote:

> On Mon, 26 Sep 2011 00:28:25 +0100
> Simon Wilkinson <sxw@inf.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>=20
>> At the moment, the only user of that functionality is the NFS
>> translator, which is becoming unsupportable on today's operating
>> systems.
>=20
> If by "today's operating systems" you mean "Linux" then sure. But =
then,
> arguably so is the OpenAFS kernel client in general.

It's a more general problem than that. The translator requires hooking =
into parts of the NFS server stack that typically aren't exposed to =
filesystem modules. The NFS translator code has traditionally done that =
by poking around in kernel internals, either by calling internal =
functions, or by hooking itself into dispatch tables. This was fine when =
kernels were large monolithic beasts, but as modern kernels (not just =
Linux) start to separate individual modules from each other, and move =
dispatch tables into read only sections of memory, it becomes much, much =
harder.

I think jhutz's idea for a userspace AFS->NFS translator is probably the =
way to go for the future, although if that does appear, it does destroy =
my argument for avoiding the use of rmtsys.

S.